After watching my third rape revenge film in the space of as many days, I find myself paying more attention to the footsteps behind me as I walk home from work. I jump as someone brushes past; flinch at the click of an umbrella being opened.

I can't really blame the first film I saw for my jumpiness. After watching Teeth, currently in cinemas, I'm not scared, but both entertained and faintly depressed. Written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein (son of pop artist Roy), Teeth is a deft horror-comedy, distinguished by a central performance from Jess Weixler. She plays Dawn, a US high school student, who lives with her seriously ill mother, kind stepfather and vile stepbrother. Young, blond, and a leading light in her local abstinence group, Dawn is, like her name, a symbol of dewy promise.

Her love interest, Tobey, is similarly saccharine, and when they head off to a rural vale together, everything seems ideal. They swim, kiss, laugh - and then Tobey attempts to rape Dawn. She passes out, and when he finally penetrates her, the teeth that are hidden in her vagina - teeth she wasn't aware of - clamp down. He is dismembered in the most literal sense of the word.

With that, Teeth becomes the latest in a long line of rape revenge films, and certainly one of the most quirky. These films have taken different forms: some feature parents who avenge an attack on their daughter (A Time To Kill, An Eye for an Eye, Last House on the Left, Death Wish); others feature husbands who avenge an attack on their partner (Straw Dogs, Irréversible, Death Wish again). The genre as a whole is complex, but perhaps the most controversial films are those in which a woman wreaks revenge. These convey very mixed messages, particularly for a female audience: on the one hand, they often show multiple images of sexual assault, which can seem exploitative; on the other, they give female protagonists the chance to fight back. Are they empowering for women, or quite the opposite?

There seems little doubt that Lichtenstein made Teeth with a feminist intent: he has described it is an attempt to address the gynophobia of the vagina dentata myth, and has noted that we live in a world where "women are raped, forcibly circumcised, so maybe Dawn is an example of nature adapting to this male-dominated world".

Despite this, the film left me feeling uneasy. Aside from Dawn's stepfather, she is surrounded by hideous men: a gynaecologist who carries out a brutal internal examination; a boy who drugs her and has sex with her for a bet. In fact, every guy she meets is a monster. I couldn't help thinking that if a woman had made this film she would have been vilified for her view of masculinity. And while the central plot twist might seem a strong, funny way to address the situation, it falls flat on a few levels. One is that when Dawn's teeth initially clamp into gear, the mechanism is entirely involuntary - the audience can't relate to her as an avenging angel, only as a befuddled girl who happens to have incisors in her hoo-ha. The other is that Dawn's physique enables her to fight back only when she has been penetrated. Lichtenstein has described her mutation as a superhuman power, but as superpowers go, this one's pretty flawed.

Watching my second rape revenge film, Thelma and Louise (1991), written by Callie Khouri and directed by Ridley Scott, some themes of the genre start to emerge: the fact that these films teem with hideous male characters, for instance. There's Thelma's husband, Darryl, a petulant, raging man who is quite clearly cheating on his wife. When she takes off on vacation with her best friend Louise, Thelma meets an apparently charming chancer called Harlan, who attempts to rape her in a car park. Thankfully, Louise shows up with a gun and shoots him.

Thelma and Louise is an often comic film, but its treatment of rape is shot through with hopelessness. Thelma wants to go to the police, but Louise recognises there is no recourse to justice: "Who's going to believe that he was raping you when you were dancing cheek to cheek all night? We don't live in that kind of world, Thelma."

Like Dawn in Teeth, Thelma is a childlike and innocent character, who becomes tougher as the narrative progresses; essentially, she grows up. There is just one positive male character in the film - Hal, the police officer played by Harvey Keitel. The world the film depicts is one in which women are constantly harassed, with no hope of justice. It is also a world in which the only possible ending for a woman who fights back is death.

The third film was the one I had been dreading most. I Spit on Your Grave (1978), written and directed by Meir Zarchi, has been reviled by feminists. It was banned in Britain during the video nasties panic of the 1980s, and was described on its release by US film critic Roger Ebert as "a vile bag of garbage".

In this film, also known as Day of the Woman, a young writer called Jenny (Camille Keaton) heads to the country to write her first novel. There she encounters four men, who abduct her in their powerboat, and proceed to rape her over the course of more than half an hour. There are two ways of reading the interminable rape scene: one is that it shows the brutality of rape, and manages to do so without being too explicit (the focus is mainly on the faces of the rapists and the victim, although the version seen by early audiences will have been different, as the film was cut for its eventual British video release). The other reading, of course, is that the extended scenes are incredibly gratuitous.

I was veering to the former reading, but was put off by what followed. As Jenny takes her revenge, she does so in a sexualised way, having intercourse with the first of the gang whom she entices to his death, and a naked bath with the second, whom she castrates. But it isn't as exploitative as I had expected. There is something satisfyingly completist about it - Jenny is attacked by four men, all of whom she kills. And while the closing metaphor is very obvious (she speeds away in their powerboat), it is, relatively speaking, an upbeat ending.

I watched two other films, which followed similar scripts. Dirty Weekend (1993) and Ms 45 (1981) both feature young, isolated heroines surrounded by revolting men, who harden as a result of male brutality, and proceed to respond violently to harassment in all its forms. In Dirty Weekend, the protagonist, Bella, gets away with the violence she metes out, but this seems a pyrrhic victory: if the best revenge is to live happily, then she can never really succeed in the world that's been depicted. And in Ms 45, the mute protagonist goes on a crazed killing spree that can only ever end in her death - and does.

It's possible to give all these films a feminist reading. In Teeth and Thelma and Louise there is definite wish-fulfilment for female audiences in seeing brutality addressed in direct and often inventive ways. But in every case, there is a bleakness that ultimately undermines any other message. Cumulatively, they induce a sense of fear - the sense that the footsteps behind you are growing louder - and a recognition that, while harassment proliferates, justice does not. This may be realistic, but there's an inadvertent misogynist message, one that encourages women to feel unsafe, to stay at home. Give me a romantic comedy any day.

About this article

The evil that men do

This article appeared on p28 of the G2 section of the Guardian
on Tuesday 24 June 2008.
It was published on
the Guardian website
at 06.12 EDT on Wednesday 25 June 2008.
It was last modified at 06.12 EDT on Thursday 26 June 2008.
It was first published at 06.12 EDT on Thursday 26 June 2008.